Top-ranked liberal arts college is calling for its president to address its 'legacy of white supremacy'

Students gathered on Thursday to protest against
discrimination on campus.Judd
Liebman

Amherst College is the latest school to become embroiled in
protests over racial discrimination on campus.

The Amherst, Massachusetts-based school hosted a sit-in on
Thursday to support protests at the University of Missouri
and to discuss race on campus. The sit-ins drew massive crowds of
the student body.

The students then
released a list of demands online that more than 50 student
groups on campus signed. The demands were largely sweeping
condemnations of what some students say is a history of
racism on the 194-year-old campus.

Two of the demands called for Amherst President Biddy
Martin and Chairman of the Board of
Trustees Cullen Murphy to apologize for what the protesting
students say is the school's institutional legacy of white
supremacy.

"We want to feel at home on campus," organizer Andrew
Lindsay told Business Insider. Lindsay, a black senior at
Amherst, went on to explain that many students of color don't
feel like they have had a space to make theirs and for their
voices to be heard on campus.

He also indicated that students are working with and not against
the administration, and that so far, administrators have been
incredibly supportive.

Still, students are threatening to ratchet up their protests if
demands aren't met quickly. "If these goals are not initiated
within the next 24 to 48 hours, and completed by November 18th,
we will organize and respond in a radical manner, through civil
disobedience," the online demands say.

The protests have also been met with derision by academics
who find the recent uprisings on college campuses to be
a dangerous example of free speech being limited.

“We're seeing a curtain of McCarthyism descend over many college
campuses,” Alan Dershowitz, a respected Harvard Law professor,
told Fox News.

"The last thing many of these students want is real diversity —
diversity of ideas."